Are you middle class?
Concept, research, writing, and data work by Alyssa Fowers, page design by Shelly Tan, and front-end development by Luis Melgar and Kevin Schaul
Society for News Design Award of Excellence / Included in FlowingData’s Best of 2023
This quiz compared reader incomes to multiple income-based definitions of the middle class, showed how those results changed when taking into account location and family size, and explored reasons why a reader might not feel like they belong to the middle class. The piece compared readers to others in their ZIP code, explored whether that ZIP code was representative of their metropolitan area as a whole, and asked readers questions about their financial security, independently from their income. The quiz ended with an answer to the question “are you middle class” that took into account all of the results and provided an auto-text explanation of the result.
